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Let’s talk about (biological) sex — part II
When philosophy meets biology: should we stop talking about sex?
Last time we began a discussion of a recent paper in the philosophy of biology, authored by Aja Watkins and Marina DiMarco, in which the authors suggested that it would be better for biologists to do away with the notion of sex.
Part of their argument was that there are exceptions in the biological world, species for which the concept of sex seems problematic. For instance: “In some shark species, many reptiles, and some birds, egg-producing individuals can reproduce asexually via parthenogenesis. New Mexico whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis neomexicanus) now only reproduce this way; there are no remaining ‘males.’” (p. 5)
The implication seems to be that these cases are somehow problematic for the gametic view of sex. They aren’t. There are species of birds who have lost the ability to fly (e.g., penguins), which doesn’t negate the broad generalization that birds, usually, are flying vertebrates. Again, in biology exceptions are understood from an evolutionary perspective, within general frameworks provided by concepts like “sex,” “species,” “flying vertebrates,” and so forth.
Watkins & DiMarco then go on to discuss more sophisticated philosophical accounts of sex, such as the “homeostatic property cluster” one. These are interesting, but get rather technical, and they don’t change the basic goal of their paper: the standard (i.e., gametic) definition of sex in evolutionary biology ought to be eliminated from scientific parlance because it is, in the authors’ view, “problematic” on multiple fronts.
Notwithstanding Watkins & DiMarco’s frequent “worries” (a standard locution in technical philosophy papers), biologists find the gametic definition of sex useful because it is causally and historically connected to other relevant biological properties, such as different morphologies, mating strategies, parenting behavior, and so on. As another philosopher, Paul Griffiths (quoted by the authors), puts it:
“The payoff for this way of thinking about sexes is…
